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How to allow unprivileged apache/PHP to do a root task (CentOS)

- by Chris

I am setting up a sort of personal dropbox for our customers on a CentOS 6.3 machine. The server will be accessible thru SFTP and a proprietary http service base on PHP. This machine will be in our DMZ so it has to be secure. Because of this I have apache running as an unprivileged user, hardened the security on apache, the OS, PHP, applied a lot of filtering in iptables and applied some restrictive TCP Wrappers. Now you might have suspected this one was coming, SELinux is also set to enforcing. I'm setting up PAM to use MySQL so my users in the web application can login. These users will all be in a group that can use SSH only for SFTP and users will be chrooted to their own 'home' folder. To allow this SELinux wants the folders to have the user_home_t tag. Also the parent directory needs to be writable by root only. If these restrictions are not met SELinux will kill the SSH pipe immediately. The files that need to be accessible thru both http and SFTP so I have made a SELinux module to allow Apache to search/attr/read/write etc. to directories with the user_home_dir_t tag. As sftp users are stored in MySQL I want to setup their home dirs upon user creation. This is a problem since Apache has no write access to the /home dir, it's only writable by root since it's required to keep SELinux and OpenSSH happy. Basically I need to let Apache do only a few tasks as root and only within /home. So I need to somehow elevate the privileges temporarily or let root do these tasks for apache instead. What I need to have apache do with root privileges is the following. mkdir /home/userdir/ mkdir /home/userdir/userdir chmod -R 0755 /home/userdir umask 011 /home/userdir/userdir chcon -R -t user_home_t /home/userdir chown -R user:sftp_admin /home/userdir/userdir chmod 2770 /home/userdir/userdir This would create a home for the user, now I have an idea that might work, cron. That would mean the server needs to check for users that have no home every minute, then when creating users the interface would freeze for an average of 30 seconds before the account creation can be confirmed which I do not prefer. Does anybody know if something can be done with sudoers? Or any other idea's are welcome... Thanks for your time!

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VPN Connection Causes Internal LAN Connection Loss with Server

- by sleepisfortheweak

I've tried configuring basic PPTP VPN at my small business using a number of different tutorials. As far as I can tell, the actual VPN connection worked fine, but upon connecting a client, the Server 'disappears' from the internal LAN. The RRAS service must be stopped before the connection is restored. My Setup: The network is simply a DSL Gateway/Router to the outside functioning as NAT/Firewall/DHCP. The server is a Win Server 2008 machine at fixed IP 192.168.1.200. The server has 1 NIC, so I used the 'custom' option when configuring RRAS. The RRAS settings should be default except that I've disabled ports for connection types I'm not using and reduced PPTP ports to 10. I've also created an address pool and disabled DHCP packet forwarding. The server only functions as a File Share and now a VPN Server. Local LAN computers all have mapped network shares to the server authenticated based on Local User/Group setup on the server. The Problem: The moment a client connects through VPN, the server 'disappears' from the local network. All mapped drives disconnect and there is no response to a ping 192.168.1.200. Even if the client disconnects, the server does not re-appear at that address until the RRAS service is stopped. I've Tried: Using an Address Pool inside and outside the local subnet. Using DCHP Relay Checking Inbound/Outbound filters (none enabled) The fact that nothing I've tried has had any effect, and that I can connect and successfully obtain an IP tells me that it's something more fundamental I'm missing. My gut tells me that it's something to do with the second IP address added by the VPN client somehow taking over the interface or traffic from the local LAN accidently getting routed to the VPN client instead of handled at the server once RRAS has become 'active' when a client connects. Hopefully this may be obvious to someone with real IT experience. I've been doing this a while and almost never been stumped. I'm starting to think it might actually be something tricky since my setup is pretty basic yet refuses to work. I'll be happy to include more info if this doesn't ring any bells right away for anyone. Thanks

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Recovering from backup without original install media

- by KGendron

A machine from my old job had a complete hard drive failure. I have backups but I'm running into severe problems restoring from them. The only install media was a secondary restore partition on the system's hard drive. I hate whoever came up with that idea more than i can possibly express with words. I spent several days trying to recover the disk - it is pretty well shot and none of my best tricks could even get it to show up in the bios/ The machine that broke is an hp with xp media center edition on it (I don't know why either). The backups were created using the default windows backup tool - I have .bfk file on an external hardrive that i am trying to restore from. I've replaced the hard drive. My home machine is running windows 7 64bit and i'm trying to use it as a platform to restore to the other disk. I downloaded the window 7 nt-restore utility, however no matter what i do it restores to my C drive rather than the specified drive. Fortunately win7 security settings prevented it from being a complete disaster - but still not a happy thing. I tried firing up the xp virtual machine. I can browse to the backups but it says they are invalid and refuse to let me view/ continue with the restore. I tried installing XP to an extra harddrive on my machine - however it bluescreens on me during the install process and I cry. I tried installing xp pro to the new drive and attempted to restore over it, it of course blackscreened on me as that was a stupid idea. I made two partitions on the new hard drive (Apparently the bios on this accursed piece of junk doesn't allow hd partitions larger than 200G anyways and thus fails 40 minutes into the install with an ever-descriptive "Disk Read Error". Guess how i spent last weekend? My last idea was to install xp pro to the second partition and then use it to restore from backup to the first. After the first restart it gives me the error "Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware". My brain made one of those bad hard drive clicky noises. I've tried several boot disks but they don't seem to work. If anyone has a link to a good one it would be greatly appreciated. Anyone have any more ideas? - I really hate asking on what seems like such a simple issue but i am quite literally at my wit's end. Thanks - and sorry for the really long post.

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Create text file named after a cell containing other cell data

- by user143041

I tried using the code below for the Excel program on my `Mac Mini using the OS X Version 10.7.2 and it keeps saying Error due to file name / path: (The Excel file I am creating is going to be a template with my formulas and macros installed which will be used over and over). Sub CreateFile() Do While Not IsEmpty(ActiveCell.Offset(0, 1)) MyFile = ActiveCell.Value & ".txt" fnum = FreeFile() Open MyFile For Output As fnum Print #fnum, ActiveCell.Offset(0, 1) & " " & ActiveCell.Offset(0, 2) Close #fnum ActiveCell.Offset(1, 0).Select Loop End Sub What Im trying to do: 1st Objective I would like to have the following data to be used to create a text file. A:A is what I need the name of the file to be. B:2 is the content I need in the text file. So, A2 - "repair-video-game-Glassboro-NJ-08028.txt" is the file name and B2 to be the content in the file. Next, A3 is the file name and B3 is the content for the file, etc. ONCE the content reads what is in cell A16 and B16 (length will vary), the file creation should stop, if not then I can delete the additional files created. This sheet will never change. Is there a way to establish the excel macro to always go to this sheet instead of have to select it with the mouse to identify the starting point? 2nd Objective I would like to have the following data to be used to create a text file. A:1 is what I need the name of the file to be. B:B is the content I want in the file. So, A2 - is the file name "geo-sitemap.xml" and B:B to be the content in the file (ignore the .xml file extension in the photo). ONCE the content cell reads what is in cell "B16" (length will vary), the file creation should stop, if not then I can adjust the cells that have need content (formulated content you see in the image is preset for 500 rows). This sheet will never change. Is there a way to establish the excel macro to always go to this sheet instead of have to select it with the mouse to identify the starting point? I can Provide the content in the cells that are filled in by excel formulas that are not not to be included in the .txt files. It is ok if it is not possible. I can delete the extra cells that are not populated (based on the data sheet). Please let me know if you need any more additional information or clarity and I will be happy to provide it.

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TrueCrypt partition will no longer mount

- by sparkyuiop

I am hoping for some advice to help me out of my situation, with luck. I have a computer running Windows 7 Ultimate x64 with 3 hard disks installed. On my 2TB hard disk 2 (non-system disk) I have 4 partitions. One is for music, another for video, a downloads partition and a 500GB RAW Truecrypt encrypted partition / volume that I had setup to mount with 4 photographs used as keyfiles. The 4 photographs are located in my 'Documents' partition which is one of four partitions on my 1.5TB hard disk 1 (non-system disk) When I setup the disk encryption I did not (I'm 99% sure) create a password, I only used the 4 photograph keyfiles to mount the volume. Recently my 1TB hard disk 0 (system / boot) started to fail so I decided to replace it. I was going to clone the old disk to a new disk but decided that a fresh installation would be more beneficial. Once I had transferred all the required 'User Data' from my old hard disk 0 (C: disk) I discarded it. I reinstalled Truecrypt, pointed to the partition, selected my 4 keyfiles photographs and I mounted my encrypted volume with no issues. In fact I mounted it several times after re-installing Windows and after reboots. Now all of a sudden when I try and mount it I get the message "incorrect keyfile(s) and/or password or not a Truecrypt volume". Now I am not sure why this happened as I do not recall exactly what I did between last mounting the volume successfully and it not mounting. Here are some of the possible things I may have done to cause it to stop working but I am at a loss as to where to start to try and resolve the problem. 1. I had swapped the drive letters to a preferred order. 2. I possibly swapped the physical SATA connectors on the mainboard. 3. I enabled 'Hot Plugging' for the two non-system hard disk SATA ports and the DVD SATA port in the BIOS. I have tried changing the encrypted partition drive letter as suggested in another post but this does not help. On my old system the encrypted drive was drive "X". I have about tried it with all the other free drive letters but alas nothing changes. I do not recall what drive letter was allocated to the encrypted partition before I changed them all. I have not tried to change the letter back to what it possibly was to start with as I am happy with the current layout. I will try this is anyone thinks it would be worthwhile though. I do hope I have managed to convey my situation in an understandable manner and live in hope someone could help me recover years of personal files. Thank you very much for taking the time to read my post and for any suggestions you may offer. Regards Phillip Thorne (UK) Anyone???

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Nginx common configuration that I might have missed

- by ApPeL

I recently moved from Apache Mod_wsgi to Nginx, and I have seen a major improvement on speed a lowering on memory usage and I am generally very happy with the it. I am not a server expert, so please be gentle. I am wondering if there are any small configuration that I might have missed, that will cause me some issues in the long run... Please see my nginx.conf file user nginx nginx; worker_processes 4; error_log /var/log/nginx/error_log info; events { worker_connections 1024; use epoll; } http { include /etc/nginx/mime.types; default_type application/octet-stream; log_format main '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] ' '"$request" $status $bytes_sent ' '"$http_referer" "$http_user_agent" ' '"$gzip_ratio"'; client_header_timeout 10m; client_body_timeout 10m; send_timeout 10m; connection_pool_size 256; client_header_buffer_size 1k; large_client_header_buffers 4 2k; request_pool_size 4k; gzip on; gzip_min_length 1100; gzip_buffers 4 8k; gzip_types text/plain; output_buffers 1 32k; postpone_output 1460; sendfile on; tcp_nopush on; tcp_nodelay on; keepalive_timeout 75 20; ignore_invalid_headers on; index index.html; server { listen 80; server_name localhost; location /media/ { root /www/django_test1/myapp; # Notice this is the /media folder that we create above } location /mediaadmin/ { alias /opt/python2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/django/contrib/admin/media/; # Notice this is the /media folder that we create above } location / { # host and port to fastcgi server fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:8080; fastcgi_param SERVER_ADDR $server_addr; fastcgi_param SERVER_PORT $server_port; fastcgi_param SERVER_NAME $server_name; fastcgi_param SERVER_PROTOCOL $server_protocol; fastcgi_param PATH_INFO $fastcgi_script_name; fastcgi_param REQUEST_METHOD $request_method; fastcgi_param QUERY_STRING $query_string; fastcgi_param CONTENT_TYPE $content_type; fastcgi_param CONTENT_LENGTH $content_length; fastcgi_pass_header Authorization; fastcgi_intercept_errors off; client_max_body_size 100M; } access_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.access_log main; error_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.error_log; } }

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How do i return integers from a string ?

- by kannan.ambadi

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Suppose you are passing a string(for e.g.: “My name has 1 K, 2 A and 3 N”) which may contain integers, letters or special characters. I want to retrieve only numbers from the input string. We can implement it in many ways such as splitting the string into an array or by using TryParse method. I would like to share another idea, that’s by using Regular expressions. All you have to do is, create an instance of Regular Expression with a specified pattern for integer. Regular expression class defines a method called Split, which splits the specified input string based on the pattern provided during object initialization. We can write the code as given below: public static int[] SplitIdSeqenceValues(object combinedArgs) { var _argsSeperator = new Regex(@"\D+", RegexOptions.Compiled); string[] splitedIntegers = _argsSeperator.Split(combinedArgs.ToString()); var args = new int[splitedIntegers.Length]; for (int i = 0; i < splitedIntegers.Length; i++) args[i] = MakeSafe.ToSafeInt32(splitedIntegers[i]); return args; } It would be better, if we set to RegexOptions.Compiled so that the regular expression will have performance boost by faster compilation. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Happy Programming :))

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XNA Notes 009

- by George Clingerman

This past week the MVPs (myself included) were on Microsoft campus for the MVP summit. So I apologize in advance if you did something cool or heard of something cool happening with XNA and XBLIGs and it’s not in my notes. I did my best to stay on top of things, but honestly this community is fast and furious with what it’s doing and creating. I really can’t keep up and that’s fantastic! But here’s what I *did* notice while I was there on Microsoft Campus (and I did make sure to point out to the XNA team several of these very cool happenings while I had their ears). Time Critical XNA News: The XNA team wants you to know that Dream Build Play registration is now open! http://blogs.msdn.com/b/xna/archive/2011/02/28/registration-now-open-for-dream-build-play-2011-challenge.aspx Join the XNA-UK create on March 24, 2011 at the Microsoft Tech Days Conference http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/27/join-the-xna-uk-crew-at-the-microsoft-tech-days-conference-on-24th-march-2011.aspx XNA Team: Shawn Hargreaves shares one of the coolest things that’s happened in the XNA community http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2011/03/02/xbox-indies-pivot-view.aspx Nick Gravelyn continues his unique marketing/work prioritization strategy as he tries to get to 5,000 Pixel Man users before he makes Pixel Man 2 (and he’s almost there!) http://nickgravelyn.com/pixelman2/ XNA MVPs: A lot of the XNA MVPs were at the Microsoft MVP Summit 2011. Due to NDAs, most things can’t be shared, but I’m sure if you’re curious you could ask them about the general vibe and feeling they got from the team and the future of XNA/XBLIG and more. Catalin Zima and team release the free WP7 game Chickens Can Dream http://twitter.com/CatalinZima/statuses/41174062923390976 http://www.amusedsloth.com/2011/02/chickens-can-dream-is-live/ Charles Humphrey (NemoKrad) posts his March talk source and PowerPoint http://xna-uk.net/blogs/randomchaos/archive/2011/03/04/march-2011-talk-post-processing-framework.aspx XNA Developers: Michael B. McLaughlin posts about ANTS Memory Profile and creates a CheckMemoryAllocationGame sample (extremely useful if you’re looking to see how much memory some operation allocates!) http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/28/ants-memory-profiler-7.0-review.aspx http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/03/01/checkmemoryallocationgame-sample.aspx Andy Schatz (2009 IGF winner for Monaco) talking XNA at GDC 2011 http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/33313/GDC_2011_Andy_Schatz_Ill_Make_My_Last_Game_When_I_Die.php Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Clover: A Curious Tale by BinaryTweed is coming as a Deal of the Week during St. Patricks Day http://majornelson.com/archive/2011/03/03/comingsoontothexboxlivemarketplacemarchthird.aspx Ska Studios away at GDC but still very post happy as always http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/03/02/swamped-picture-pack/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/28/the-february-showcase/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/25/good-morning-gato-51-smelling-the-roses/ Just Press Start interviews Matthew Mikuszewski of Darkwind Media about Blocks Indie http://justpressstart.net/?p=516 Gamergeddon Xbox Indie Game Round Up - February 27th http://www.gamergeddon.com/2011/02/27/xbox-indie-game-round-up-february-27th/ http://www.gamergeddon.com/category/xbox-360/indie-games/ GameMarx does a round up of all the Xbox Live Indie Game podcasts that are currently available http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/27/xbox-live-indie-game-podcasts.aspx GameMarx episode 11 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/26/ep-11-february-25-2011.aspx In perhaps what I feel is the most exciting news I’ve heard all week, Michael C. Neel (ViNull of GameMarx fame) re-launch XboxIndies.com! http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/03/01/the-relaunch-of-xboxindies-com.aspx http://xboxindies.com/ Armless Octopus shares a little of what they heard from Luke Schneider of Radiangames during his GDC 2011 talk http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/02/gdc-2011-luke-schneider-offers-insight-into-radiangames-success/ VVGindiecast Episode 1 with guests Derek Strickland(Mr_Deeke), Kris Steele(Kriswd40 from FunInfused Games) and Dave Voyles(From armlessoctopus.com) http://vvgtv.com/2011/02/25/vvgindiecast-xblig-podcast/ If you’re doing Xbox LIVE Indie Game Reviews get in touch with XboxIndies.com to get into their aggregated feed http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/76931/467189.aspx#467189 B.U.T.T.O.N and Flotilla represented XNA very well at the Independent Games Festival (are there any more games entered that were created using XNA? Stand up and be heard!) http://www.igf.com/php-bin/entry2011.php?id=374 Armless Ocotopus interview at GDC 2011 with Soulcaster creator Ian Stocker http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/03/04/gdc-2011-interview-with-soulcaster-creator-ian-stocker/ MommysBestGames gets a nod in the DarkBasic newsletter where it features the Explosionade Editor (just do a search for Explosionade to get to the interesting bits!) http://www.thegamecreators.com/pages/newsletters/newsletter_issue_98.html You may be hearing the cries of FortressCraft (coming soon to XBLIG) being so wrong for stealing the idea from MineCraft. But did you know the the game MineCraft started from was an XNA game called Infiniminer? XNA is getting it’s fingers into EVERYTHING! http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Infiniminer XNA Development: TorqueX is NOT dead thanks to the tremendous efforts of the XNA Community working on the CEV (special thanks to @PinoEire for all his hard work on making that happen!) http://www.garagegames.com/community/blogs/view/20878 http://torquecev.com/ Dave Henry has posted XNA 3.x adding platformer start kit to the network game state management on his new site http://twitter.com/#!/mort8088/status/43407715908853760 http://mort8088.com/2011/03/03/xna-3-x-adding-platformer-starter-kit-to-network-game-state-management/ Mark Bamford releases XNAViewer 4.0, great for running XNA games inside of a Windows Form (for building level editors, etc.) http://twitter.com/#!/xzodia04/status/43466830412660736 http://xnaviewer.codeplex.com/ Unit testing an XNA game with Resharper and NUnit http://smnbss.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/planetx-unit-testing-an-xna-game-with-resharper-and-nunit-wp7-xbox-xna/ XNA for Silverlight developers: Part 5 - Input (touch + gestures) http://ht.ly/1bxwUE Mike McLaughlin shares a link he stumbled across for those looking to understand vector and matrix math http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/42587074725036032 http://chortle.ccsu.edu/VectorLessons/vectorIndex.html DigitalRune Resources Pooling in XNA (Part 1) http://www.digitalrune.com/Support/Blog/tabid/719/EntryId/84/DigitalRune-Helper-Library-Resource-Pooling-in-XNA-Part-1.aspx JohnK “bobthecbuilder” released a new SunBurn Update that lowers the requirements for Windows Games http://twitter.com/#!/bobthecbuilder/status/43457306578522112 http://www.synapsegaming.com/blogs/johnk/archive/2011/03/03/sunburn-update-windows-redistributable.aspx Quick update on the Indiefreaks Game Framework v0.4 development status http://indiefreaks.com/2011/03/04/quick-update-on-igf-v0-4-development/

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SQL SERVER – Beginning SQL Server: One Step at a Time – SQL Server Magazine

- by pinaldave

I am glad to announce that along with SQLAuthority.com, I will be blogging on the prominent site of SQL Server Magazine. My very first blog post there is already live; read here: Beginning SQL Server: One Step at a Time. My association with SQL Server Magazine has been quite long, I have written nearly 7 to 8 SQL Server articles for the print magazine and it has been a great experience. I used to stay in the United States at that time. I moved back to India for good, and during this process, I had put everything on hold for a while. Just like many things, “temporary” things become “permanent” – coming back to SQLMag was on hold for long time. Well, this New Year, things have changed – once again, I am back with my online presence at SQLMag.com. Everybody is a beginner at every task or activity at some point of his/her life: spelling words for the first time; learning how to drive for the first time, etc. No one is perfect at the start of any task, but every human is different. As time passes, we all develop our interests and begin to study our subject of interest. Most of us dream to get a job in the area of our study – however things change as time passes. I recently read somewhere online (I could not find the link again while writing this one) that all the successful people in various areas have never studied in the area in which they are successful. After going through a formal learning process of what we love, we refuse to stop learning, and we finally stop changing career and focus areas. We move, we dare and we progress. IT field is similar to our life. New IT professionals come to this field every day. There are two types of beginners – a) those who are associated with IT field but not familiar with other technologies, and b) those who are absolutely new to the IT field. Learning a new technology is always exciting and overwhelming for enthusiasts. I am working with database (in particular) for SQL Server for more than 7 years but I am still overwhelmed with so many things to learn. I continue to learn and I do not think that I should ever stop doing so. Just like everybody, I want to be in the race and get ahead in learning the technology. For the same, I am always looking for good guidance. I always try to find a good article, blog or book chapter, which can teach me what I really want to learn at this stage in my career and can be immensely helpful. Quite often, I prefer to read the material where the author does not judge me or assume my understanding. I like to read new concepts like a child, who takes his/her first steps of learning without any prior knowledge. Keeping my personal philosophy and preference in mind, I will be blogging on SQL Server Magazine site. I will be blogging on the beginners stuff. I will be blogging for them, who really want to start and make a mark in this area. I will be blogging for all those who have an extreme passion for learning. I am happy that this is a good start for this year. One of my resolutions is to help every beginner. It is totally possible that in future they all will grow and find the same article quite ‘easy‘ – well when that happens, it indicates the success of the article and material! Well, I encourage everybody to read my SQL Server Magazine blog – I will be blogging there frequently on various topics. To begin, we will be talking about performance tuning, and I assure that I will not shy away from other multiple areas. Read my SQL Server Magazine Blog: Beginning SQL Server: One Step at a Time I think the title says it all. Do leave your comments and feedback to indicate your preference of subject and interest. I am going to continue writing on subject, and the aim is of course to help grow in this field. Reference : Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: Pinal Dave, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Optimization, SQL Performance, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology

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Announcing SonicAgile – An Agile Project Management Solution

- by Stephen.Walther

I’m happy to announce the public release of SonicAgile – an online tool for managing software projects. You can register for SonicAgile at www.SonicAgile.com and start using it with your team today. SonicAgile is an agile project management solution which is designed to help teams of developers coordinate their work on software projects. SonicAgile supports creating backlogs, scrumboards, and burndown charts. It includes support for acceptance criteria, story estimation, calculating team velocity, and email integration. In short, SonicAgile includes all of the tools that you need to coordinate work on a software project, get stuff done, and build great software. Let me discuss each of the features of SonicAgile in more detail. SonicAgile Backlog You use the backlog to create a prioritized list of user stories such as features, bugs, and change requests. Basically, all future work planned for a product should be captured in the backlog. We focused our attention on designing the user interface for the backlog. Because the main function of the backlog is to prioritize stories, we made it easy to prioritize a story by just drag and dropping the story from one location to another. We also wanted to make it easy to add stories from the product backlog to a sprint backlog. A sprint backlog contains the stories that you plan to complete during a particular sprint. To add a story to a sprint, you just drag the story from the product backlog to the sprint backlog. Finally, we made it easy to track team velocity — the average amount of work that your team completes in each sprint. Your team’s average velocity is displayed in the backlog. When you add too many stories to a sprint – in other words, you attempt to take on too much work – you are warned automatically: SonicAgile Scrumboard Every workday, your team meets to have their daily scrum. During the daily scrum, you can use the SonicAgile Scrumboard to see (at a glance) what everyone on the team is working on. For example, the following scrumboard shows that Stephen is working on the Fix Gravatar Bug story and Pete and Jane have finished working on the Product Details Page story: Every story can be broken into tasks. For example, to create the Product Details Page, you might need to create database objects, do page design, and create an MVC controller. You can use the Scrumboard to track the state of each task. A story can have acceptance criteria which clarify the requirements for the story to be done. For example, here is how you can specify the acceptance criteria for the Product Details Page story: You cannot close a story — and remove the story from the list of active stories on the scrumboard — until all tasks and acceptance criteria associated with the story are done. SonicAgile Burndown Charts You can use Burndown charts to track your team’s progress. SonicAgile supports Release Burndown, Sprint Burndown by Task Estimates, and Sprint Burndown by Story Points charts. For example, here’s a sample of a Sprint Burndown by Story Points chart: The downward slope shows the progress of the team when closing stories. The vertical axis represents story points and the horizontal axis represents time. Email Integration SonicAgile was designed to improve your team’s communication and collaboration. Most stories and tasks require discussion to nail down exactly what work needs to be done. The most natural way to discuss stories and tasks is through email. However, you don’t want these discussions to get lost. When you use SonicAgile, all email discussions concerning a story or a task (including all email attachments) are captured automatically. At any time in the future, you can view all of the email discussion concerning a story or a task by opening the Story Details dialog: Why We Built SonicAgile We built SonicAgile because we needed it for our team. Our consulting company, Superexpert, builds websites for financial services, startups, and large corporations. We have multiple teams working on multiple projects. Keeping on top of all of the work that needs to be done to complete a software project is challenging. You need a good sense of what needs to be done, who is doing it, and when the work will be done. We built SonicAgile because we wanted a lightweight project management tool which we could use to coordinate the work that our team performs on software projects. How We Built SonicAgile We wanted SonicAgile to be easy to use, highly scalable, and have a highly interactive client interface. SonicAgile is very close to being a pure Ajax application. We built SonicAgile using ASP.NET MVC 3, jQuery, and Knockout. We would not have been able to build such a complex Ajax application without these technologies. Almost all of our MVC controller actions return JSON results (While developing SonicAgile, I would have given my left arm to be able to use the new ASP.NET Web API). The controller actions are invoked from jQuery Ajax calls from the browser. We built SonicAgile on Windows Azure. We are taking advantage of SQL Azure, Table Storage, and Blob Storage. Windows Azure enables us to scale very quickly to handle whatever demand is thrown at us. Summary I hope that you will try SonicAgile. You can register at www.SonicAgile.com (there’s a free 30-day trial). The goal of SonicAgile is to make it easier for teams to get more stuff done, work better together, and build amazing software. Let us know what you think!

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Installing Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Service Pack 1

- by Martin Hinshelwood

As has become customary when the product team releases a new patch, SP or version I like to document the install. Although I had no errors on my main computer, my netbook did have problems. Although I am not ready to call it a Service Pack problem just yet! Update 2011-03-10 – Running the Team Foundation Server 2010 Service Pack 1 install a second time worked As per Brian's post I am installing the Team Foundation Server Service Pack first and indeed as this is a single server local deployment I need to install both. If I only install one it will leave the other product broken. This however does not affect you if you are running Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server on separate computers as is normal in a production deployment. Main workhorse I will be installing the service pack first on my main computer as I want to actually use it here. Figure: My main workhorse I will also be installing this on my netbook which is obviously of significantly lower spec, but I will do that one after. Although, as always I had my fingers crossed, I was not really worried. Figure: KB2182621 Compared to Visual Studio there are not really a lot of components to update. Figure: TFS 2010 and SQL 2008 are the main things to update There is no “web” installer for the Team Foundation Server 2010 Service Pack, but that is ok as most people will be installing it on a production server and will want to have everything local. I would have liked a Web installer, but the added complexity for the product team is not work the capability for a 500mb patch. Figure: There is currently no way to roll SP1 and RTM together Figure: No problems with the file verification, phew Figure: Although the install took a while, it progressed smoothly Figure: I always like a success screen Well, as far as the install is concerned everything is OK, but what about TFS? Can I still connect and can I still administer it. Figure: Service Pack 1 is reflected correctly in the Administration Console I am confident that there are no major problems with TFS on my system and that it has been updated to SP1. I can do all of the things that I used before with ease, and with the new features detailed by Brian I think I will be happy. Netbook The great god Murphy has stuck, and my poor wee laptop spat the Team Foundation Server 2010 Service Pack 1 out so fast it hit me on the back of the head. That will teach me for not looking… Figure: “Installation did not succeed” I am pretty sure should not be all caps! On examining the file I found that everything worked, except the actual Team Foundation Server 2010 serving step. Action: System Requirement Checks... Action complete Action: Downloading and/or Verifying Items c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\VS10-KB2182621.msp: Verifying signature for VS10-KB2182621.msp c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\VS10-KB2182621.msp Signature verified successfully for VS10-KB2182621.msp c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\DACFramework_enu.msi: Verifying signature for DACFramework_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\DACFramework_enu.msi Signature verified successfully for DACFramework_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\DACProjectSystemSetup_enu.msi: Verifying signature for DACProjectSystemSetup_enu.msi Exists: evaluating Exists evaluated to false c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\DACProjectSystemSetup_enu.msi Signature verified successfully for DACProjectSystemSetup_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\TSqlLanguageService_enu.msi: Verifying signature for TSqlLanguageService_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\TSqlLanguageService_enu.msi Signature verified successfully for TSqlLanguageService_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SharedManagementObjects_x86_enu.msi: Verifying signature for SharedManagementObjects_x86_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SharedManagementObjects_x86_enu.msi Signature verified successfully for SharedManagementObjects_x86_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SharedManagementObjects_amd64_enu.msi: Verifying signature for SharedManagementObjects_amd64_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SharedManagementObjects_amd64_enu.msi Signature verified successfully for SharedManagementObjects_amd64_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SQLSysClrTypes_x86_enu.msi: Verifying signature for SQLSysClrTypes_x86_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SQLSysClrTypes_x86_enu.msi Signature verified successfully for SQLSysClrTypes_x86_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SQLSysClrTypes_amd64_enu.msi: Verifying signature for SQLSysClrTypes_amd64_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SQLSysClrTypes_amd64_enu.msi Signature verified successfully for SQLSysClrTypes_amd64_enu.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.cab: Verifying signature for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.cab c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.cab Signature verified successfully for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.cab c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.msi: Verifying signature for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.msi Signature verified successfully for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x86.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SetupUtility.exe: Verifying signature for SetupUtility.exe c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\SetupUtility.exe Signature verified successfully for SetupUtility.exe c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.cab: Verifying signature for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.cab c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.cab Signature verified successfully for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.cab c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.msi: Verifying signature for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.msi Signature verified successfully for vcruntime\Vc_runtime_x64.msi c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\NDP40-KB2468871.exe: Verifying signature for NDP40-KB2468871.exe c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\NDP40-KB2468871.exe Signature verified successfully for NDP40-KB2468871.exe Action complete Action: Performing actions on all Items Entering Function: BaseMspInstallerT >::PerformAction Action: Performing Install on MSP: c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\VS10-KB2182621.msp targetting Product: Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 - ENU Returning IDOK. INSTALLMESSAGE_ERROR [Error 1935.An error occurred during the installation of assembly 'Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WebAccess.WorkItemTracking,version="10.0.0.0",publicKeyToken="b03f5f7f11d50a3a",processorArchitecture="MSIL",fileVersion="10.0.40219.1",culture="neutral"'. Please refer to Help and Support for more information. HRESULT: 0x80070005. ] Returning IDOK. INSTALLMESSAGE_ERROR [Error 1712.One or more of the files required to restore your computer to its previous state could not be found. Restoration will not be possible.] Patch (c:\757fe6efe9f065130d4838081911\VS10-KB2182621.msp) Install failed on product (Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2010 - ENU). Msi Log: MSI returned 0x643 Entering Function: MspInstallerT >::Rollback Action Rollback changes PerformMsiOperation returned 0x643 PerformMsiOperation returned 0x643 OnFailureBehavior for this item is to Rollback. Action complete Final Result: Installation failed with error code: (0x80070643), "Fatal error during installation. " (Elapsed time: 0 00:14:09). Figure: Error log for Team Foundation Server 2010 install shows a failure As there is really no information in this log as to why the installation failed so I checked the event log on that box. Figure: There are hundreds of errors and it actually looks like there are more problems than a failed Service Pack I am going to just run it again and see if it was because the netbook was slow to catch on to the update. Hears hoping, but even if it fails, I would question the installation of Windows (PDC laptop original install) before I question the Service Pack Figure: Second run through was successful I don’t know if the laptop was just slow, or what… Did you get this error? If you did I will push this to the product team as a problem, but unless more people have this sort of error, I will just look to write this off as a corrupted install of Windows and reinstall.

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Oracle Open World 2012: SQL Developer Recap

- by thatjeffsmith

Last week was the ‘big show’ in San Francisco. I was very happy to meet many of you in person. And many of you had questions – lots of questions! We had full or overflowing rooms for our sessions and hands-on-labs. The SQL Developer ‘booths’ were also slammed several times. So exciting to see so many of YOU excited about SQL Developer. It’s very cool to hear the stories of our tools saving you and your organizations so much time (and money!) Instead of doing a Day 0 – Day 9 recap, I thought I’d share with you the questions that I heard more than once. And just for giggles, I’ll throw in some answers as well So in no particular order… What’s the difference between Oracle SQL Developer & Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler? Mathematically speaking – two words. But as far as the actual modeling features go, there’s no difference between the two applications. The same ‘code’ or features as it pertains to data modeling and design are in both tools. However, in SQL Developer you have all of the OTHER features fighting for real estate in the UI. So I have a general rule of thumb – if you spend MOST of your time in the database, use SQL Developer. And if you spend most of your time in the data model, run the separate and dedicated program, Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler. Here’s a couple of screenshots to drive home the UI point: Oracle SQL Developer Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler running INSIDE of SQL Developer. Notice how the Modeler menu items fold under the file menu? Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler Easier to navigate and manipulate your models with the stand alone modeler. Just no worksheet to run your ad-hoc queries, etc. Don’t forget you can disable the Data Modeler inside of SQL Developer via the Extensions preference page. How can I model my table partitions? Partitioning is defined via the Physical model. So after you have finished your relational model, you need to generate a physical model. Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler Physical Model and Partitioning Open the properties for your physical model table. Enable the ‘partitioned’ property. Once you do so, the ‘Partitioning’ page will activate. Lots and lots of partitioning support and options here But what about Interval Partitioning? An extension of range partitioning in 11gR2, we don’t currently support this partitioning scheme in SQL Developer. But we’re working on it! Can SQL Developer ignore column order when comparing models? Yes! After you start a model compare, one of your options is to disregard the order of an attribute or column definition. Tell SQL Developer you don’t care when your column shows up, just as long as it DOES show up. Wow, you got a lot of questions around modeling! Is that normal? Yes! While we appreciate that many folks inherit their applications and associated designs, new applications are being ‘born’ every day. Since both of our tools are free for anyone to design their new Oracle applications with, we attract a fair amount of attention I want to do a Hands On Lab. How do I get your software and instructional guides? Go here. Download VirtualBox. Then download the VB image. Import the appliance. Start it. Connect oracle/oracle on the OEL VM. Click on ‘Start Here’ in the desktop. Follow the instructions. If you need help, ask away! You went too fast in your Tips & Tricks session. Do you have cliff notes? Yes! And you’re SO close to finding them! Just go to my SQL Developer resources page. All of my tips are documented on this blog somewhere. I’ve indexed the most popular ones on the resource page. You can use the Search dialog on the right to find the rest. Or just send me a comment or question, and I’ll do my best to answer them as they come in.

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Using Oracle ADF Data Visualization Tools (DVT) Line Graphs to Display Weather Information

- by Christian David Straub

OverviewA guest post by Jeanne Waldman.I have a simple JDeveloper Fusion application that retrieves weather data. I wanted to compare the week's temperatures of different locations in a graph. I decided to check out the dvt:lineGraph component, and it took me a few minutes to add it to my jspx page and supply it with data.Drag and Drop the dvt:lineGraph onto your pageI opened my .jspx page in design modeIn the Component Palette, I selected ADF Data Visualization.Then I dragged 'Line' onto my page.A dialog popped up giving me options of the type of line graph. I chose the default.A lineGraph displayed with some default data. Hook up your weather dataNow I wanted to hook up my own data. I browsed the tagdoc, and I found the tabularData attribute.Attribute: tabularDataType: java.util.ListTagDoc:Specifies a list of data that the graph uses to create a grid and populate itself. The List consists of a three-member Object array for each data value to be passed to the graph. The members of each array must be organized as follows: The first member (index 0) is the column label, in the grid, of the data value. This is generally a String. If the graph has a time axis, then this should be a Java Date. Column labels typically identify groups in the graph. The second member (index 1) is the row label, in the grid, of the data value. This is generally a String. Row labels appear as series labels in the graph (usually in the legend). The third member (index 2) is the data value, which is usually a Double.The first member is the column label of the data value. This would be the day of the week.The second member is the row label of the data value. This would be the location name.The third member is the data value, usually a Double. This would be the temperature. I already had all this information, I just needed to put it in a List with a three-member Object array for each data value. /** * This is used for the lineGraph to show the data for each location. */ public List<Object[]> getTabularData() { List<Object[]> tabularData = new ArrayList<Object []>(); List<WeatherForecast> weatherForecastList = getWeatherForecastList(); // loop through the list and build up the tabular data. Then cache it. for(WeatherForecast wf : weatherForecastList) { List<ForecastDay> forecastDayList = wf.getForecastDayList(); String location = wf.getLocation(); for (ForecastDay fday : forecastDayList) { String day = fday.getPrettyDate(); String highTemp = fday.getHighF(); tabularData.add(new Object[]{day, location, Double.valueOf(highTemp)}); } } return tabularData; } Now I bound the lineGraph to this method by setting tabularData to#{weatherForAllLocationsBean.tabularData}weatherForAllLocationsBean is my bean that is defined in faces-config.xml. Adding a barGraphIn about 30 seconds, I added a barGraph with the same data. I dragged and dropped a bar graph onto the page, used the same tabularData as I did in the line graph. The page looks like this: ConclusionI was very happy how fast it was to hook up my weather data to these graphs. They look great, and they have built in functionality. For instance, I can hide/show a location by clicking on the name of the location in the legend.

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Forcing an External Activation with Service Broker

- by Davide Mauri

In these last days I’ve been working quite a lot with Service Broker, a technology I’m really happy to work with, since it can give a lot of satisfaction. The scale-out solution one can easily build is simply astonishing. I’m helping a company to build a very scalable and – yet almost inexpensive – invoicing system that has to be able to scale out using commodity hardware. To offload the work from the main server to satellite “compute nodes” (yes, I’ve borrowed this term from PDW) we’re using Service Broker and the External Activator application available in the SQL Server Feature Pack. For those who are not used to work with SSB, the External Activation is a feature that allows you to intercept the arrival of a message in a queue right from your application code. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171617.aspx (Look for “Event-Based Activation”) In order to make life even more easier, Microsoft released the External Activation application that saves you even from writing even this code. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_service_broker/archive/tags/external+activator/ The External Activator application can be configured to execute your own application so that each time a message – an invoice in my case – arrives in the target queue, the invoking application is executed and the invoice is calculated. The very nice feature of External Activator is that it can automatically execute as many configured application in order to process as many messages as your system can handle. This also a lot of create a scale-out solution, leaving to the developer only a fraction of the problems that usually came with asynchronous programming. Developers are also shielded from Service Broker since everything can be encapsulated in Stored Procedures, so that – for them – developing such scale-out asynchronous solution is not much more complex than just executing a bunch of Stored Procedures. Now, if everything works correctly, you don’t have to bother of anything else. You put messages in the queue and your application, invoked by the External Activator, process them. But what happen if for some reason your application fails to process the messages. For examples, it crashes? The message is safe in the queue so you just need to process it again. But your application is invoked by the External Activator application, so now the question is, how do you wake up that app? Service Broker will engage the activation process only if certain conditions are met: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms171601.aspx But how we can invoke the activation process manually, without having to wait for another message to arrive (the arrival of a new message is a condition that can fire the activation process)? The “trick” is to do manually with the activation process does: sending a system message to a queue in charge of handling External Activation messages: declare @conversationHandle uniqueidentifier; declare @n xml = N' <EVENT_INSTANCE> <EventType>QUEUE_ACTIVATION</EventType> <PostTime>' + CONVERT(CHAR(24),GETDATE(),126) + '</PostTime> <SPID>' + CAST(@@SPID AS VARCHAR(9)) + '</SPID> <ServerName>[your_server_name]</ServerName> <LoginName>[your_login_name]</LoginName> <UserName>[your_user_name]</UserName> <DatabaseName>[your_database_name]</DatabaseName> <SchemaName>[your_queue_schema_name]</SchemaName> <ObjectName>[your_queue_name]</ObjectName> <ObjectType>QUEUE</ObjectType> </EVENT_INSTANCE>' begin dialog conversation @conversationHandle from service [<your_initiator_service_name>] to service '<your_event_notification_service>' on contract [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/PostEventNotification] with encryption = off, lifetime = 6000 ; send on conversation @conversationHandle message type [http://schemas.microsoft.com/SQL/Notifications/EventNotification] (@n) ; end conversation @conversationHandle; That’s it! Put the code in a Stored Procedure and you can add to your application a button that says “Force Queue Processing” (or something similar) in order to start the activation process whenever you need it (which should not occur too frequently but it may happen). PS I know that the “fire-and-forget” (ending the conversation without waiting for an answer) technique is not a best practice, but in this case I don’t see how it can hurts so I decided to stay very close to the KISS principle []

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Book Review Charlene Li's New Book: Open Leadership

- by david.talamelli

A few weeks ago, I was surprised when I looked in our mail box. I had received an Advance Copy of Charlene Li's new book titled "Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead". Charlene sent a tweet a while back asking anyone interested in receiving the book to submit their details. I sent off my details and didn't think I would hear anything back, so it was a pleasant surprise. With that I almost feel bad that it has taken me 3 weeks to read her book. It took this long mainly because it has been hard to fit in some quality reading time for myself with work, the kids, volunteering, etc..... I am happy to report I have finished her book and wanted to run through my initial thoughts with you. I first came across Charlene Li after reading her book "Groundswell" a few years ago, her latest book "Open Leadership" is a follow on from Groundswell and to me it seems like a natural progression from the question "Ok the business landscape is changing, what do we do now?" For me these two books have a different writing style to them. Groundswell from memory spoke about broad social media concepts and adoption and alerted us to some of the changes taking place in the SM landscape. Open Leadership seems to be focussed on taking those broad concepts and finding ways to implement them into your environment. That is breaking broad concepts down into individual action items that can be measured and analysed. As the business world changes Leaders must change their approach and let go of control to more control. One of the things I love reading about is seeing real life examples of how people and organisations are making these things happen. In this book Charlene has collected some great collateral and case studies from companies such as Cisco, Best Buy, The Red Cross and The State Bank of India (as a side-note, I wish now that I submitted my input for the Leaders I work with here at Oracle - there are some great examples here of people who empower their staff). As society becomes more adept at using social media it is inevitable that Leaders must become open with their employees, clients and partners. From the book some of the key points I took away are (I actually took away a lot more from this book, this is just an overview) : 1) Organisations should encourage risk taking. Without being a "hacker", how can we improve ourselves, our processes, our business, etc... The old saying you only fail by not trying applies here. If Leaders create a culture where people are afraid to stick their neck out - how will you innovate? 2) Leaders need to lead by example - if you want to promote an open and transparent business, a Leader needs to exemplify the traits they would like to see out of their employees. 3) The definition of a Leader is changing, open leadership is about being a catalyst to change that uses networks to spread a vision as opposed to traditional leadership that is viewed as a role. 4) There is a cultural and business shift taking place. Information is more wide-spread and is being disseminated faster than any other time in the past. Leaders who are open and transparent will thrive in this new business environment. 5) Leadership is not defined by a title - it is defined by a person's actions. Also anyone can be a Leader or has Leadership potential in them- it is a matter of drawing that out of people. I found this book useful and I also found myself looking at my own actions and the actions of others around me (including my management) to see how open and transparent I am in my work. For me I am glad I read this book as it validated my own thoughts of the changes we are seeing take place. This book has certainly given me some new ideas and helped me push my own boundaries of what I can do. The book has a number of action plans at the end of some of the chapters such as "Conducting you Openness Audit" that I think have helped me take thoughts and ideas and turn them into concrete action items. I have included a link to the introduction of the book here if anyone wants to have a read of it. If anyone else has read this book, it would be great to hear your thoughts/comments/review. Leave your comments below. This article was originally posted on David Talamelli's Blog - David's Journal on Tap

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nm-applet gone?

- by welp

nm-applet seems to have disappeared from my system. I am running 12.10. Here's what I get when I check my package manager logs: ? ~ grep network-manager /var/log/dpkg.log 2012-10-06 10:37:08 upgrade network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu5 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-06 10:37:08 status half-configured network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu5 2012-10-06 10:37:08 status unpacked network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu5 2012-10-06 10:37:08 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu5 2012-10-06 10:37:08 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu5 2012-10-06 10:37:08 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu5 2012-10-06 10:37:08 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu5 2012-10-06 10:37:08 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu5 2012-10-06 10:37:08 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu5 2012-10-06 10:37:08 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu5 2012-10-06 10:37:09 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu5 2012-10-06 10:37:09 status unpacked network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-06 10:37:09 status unpacked network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-06 10:39:50 configure network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-06 10:39:50 status unpacked network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-06 10:39:50 status unpacked network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-06 10:39:50 status half-configured network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-06 10:39:50 status installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-28 22:27:23 status installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-28 22:27:23 remove network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-28 22:27:23 status half-configured network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-28 22:27:23 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-28 22:27:23 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-28 22:27:23 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-28 22:27:23 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-28 22:27:23 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-28 22:27:23 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-28 22:27:23 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-28 22:27:23 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-28 22:27:23 status config-files network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-28 22:27:23 status config-files network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:03 install network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:03 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:03 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:03 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:03 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:03 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:03 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:03 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:03 status half-installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:03 status unpacked network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:03 status unpacked network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:06 configure network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:06 status unpacked network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:07 status unpacked network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:07 status half-configured network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 2012-10-31 19:58:07 status installed network-manager-gnome:amd64 0.9.6.2-0ubuntu6 ? ~ Unfortunately, I cannot find network-manager-applet package at all: ? ~ apt-cache search network-manager-applet ? ~ Here are the contents of /etc/apt/sources.list: ? ~ cat /etc/apt/sources.list # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20120425)]/ dists/precise/main/binary-i386/ # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20120425)]/ dists/precise/restricted/binary-i386/ # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 12.04 LTS _Precise Pangolin_ - Release amd64 (20120425)]/ precise main restricted # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal main restricted deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal-updates main restricted deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal universe deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal universe deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal-updates universe deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal multiverse deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal multiverse deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal-updates multiverse deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal-updates multiverse ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal-backports main restricted universe multiverse deb-src http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ quantal-backports main restricted universe multiverse deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-security main restricted deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-security main restricted deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-security universe deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-security universe deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-security multiverse deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-security multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. # deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner # deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu precise partner ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal main deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal main ? ~ Right now, I can't think of anything else. Happy to provide more info upon request.

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Dynamic Grouping and Columns

- by Tim Dexter

Some good collaboration between myself and Kan Nishida (Oracle BIP Consulting) over at bipconsulting on a question that came in yesterday to an internal mailing list. Is there a way to allow columns to be place into a template dynamically? This would be similar to the Answers Column selector. A customer has said Crystal can do this and I am trying to see how BI Pub can do the same. Example: Report has Regions as a dimension in a table, they want the user to select a parameter that will insert either Units or Dollars without having to create multiple templates. Now whether Crystal can actually do it or not is another question, can Publisher? Yes we can! Kan took the first stab. His approach, was to allow to swap out columns in a table in the report. Some quick steps: 1. Create a parameter from BIP server UI 2. Declare the parameter in RTF template You can check this post to see how you can declare the parameter from the server. http://bipconsulting.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-to-pass-user-input-values-to-report.html 3. Use the parameter value to condition if a particular column needs to be displayed or not. You can use <?if@column:.....?> syntax for Column level IF condition. The if@column is covered in user documentation. This would allow a developer to create a report with the parameter or multiple parameters to allow the user to pick a column to be included in the report. I took a slightly different tack, with the mention of the column selector in the Answers report I took that to mean that the user wanted to select more of a dimensional column and then have the report recalculate all its totals and subtotals based on that selected column. This is a little bit more involved and involves some smart XSL and XPATH expressions, but still very doable. The user can select a column as a parameter, that is passed to the template rather than the query. The parameter value that is actually passed is the element name that you want to regroup the data by. Inside the template we then reference that parameter value in our for-each-group loop. That's where we need the trixy XSL/XPATH code to get the regrouping to happen. At this juncture, I need to hat tip to Klaus, for his article on dynamic sorting that he wrote back in 2006. I basically took his sorting code and applied it to the for-each loop. You can follow both of Kan's first two steps above i.e. Create a parameter from BIP server UI - this just needs to be based on a 'list' type list of value with name/value pairs e.g. Department/DEPARTMENT_NAME, Job/JOB_TITLE, etc. The user picks the 'friendly' value and the server passes the element name to the template. Declare the parameter in RTF template - been here before lots of times right? <?param@begin:group1;'"DEPARTMENT_NAME"'?> I have used a default value so that I can test the funtionality inside the template builder (notice the single and double quotes.) Next step is to use the template builder to build a re-grouped report layout. It does not matter if its hard coded right now; we will add in the dynamic piece next. Once you have a functioning template that is re-grouping correctly. Open up the for-each-group field and modify it to use the parameter: <?for-each-group:ROW;./*[name(.) = $group1]?> 'group1' is my grouping parameter, declared above. We need the XPATH expression to find the column in the XML structure we want to group that matches the one passed by the parameter. Its essentially looking through the data tree for a match. We can show the actual grouping value in the report output with a similar XPATH expression <?./*[name(.) = $group1]?> In my example, I took things a little further so that I could have a dynamic label for the parameter value. For instance if I am using MANAGER as the parameter I want to show: Manager: Tim Dexter My XML elements are readable e.g. DEPARTMENT_NAME. Its a simple case of replacing the underscore with a space and then 'initcapping' the result: <?xdoxslt:init_cap(translate($group1,'_',' '))?> With this in place, the user can now select a grouping column in the BIP report viewer and the layout will re-group the data and any calculations based on that column. I built a group above report but you could equally build the group left version to truly mimic the Answers column selector. If you are interested you can get an example report, sample data and layout template here. Of course, you can combine Klaus' dynamic sorting, Kan's conditional column approach and this dynamic grouping to build a real kick ass report for users that will keep them happy for hours..

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SharePoint Saturday Michigan 2010 Recap, Slides, and Photos

- by Brian Jackett

This past weekend I attended SharePoint Saturday Michigan (SPSMI) in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For those unfamiliar, SharePoint Saturday is a community driven event where various speakers gather to present at a FREE conference on all topics related to SharePoint. This made my third SharePoint Saturday attended and second I’ve spoken at. I believe today it was announced that about 210 people total attended the event. I was very happy with the turnout, especially the ratio of male to female attendees. Typically with computer related conferences the ratio leans towards more males attending, but both Peter Serzo (one of conference organizers) and I both commented to each other that at the end of the day it appeared to be close to 40% women in the crowd. So here’s my recap of the weekend. Arrival Friday afternoon I drove up from Columbus, OH to Ann Arbor, MI and arrived around 4pm. I was attempting to avoid the rush hour traffic and construction backups. Turned out to be a good idea because other speakers coming up Friday got stuck on a highway which literally closed down in both directions due to a bad accident. I was talking my friend Sean McDonough through the highway closing and this was the first time I had seen a solid black traffic line on Google Maps. Most of us are familiar with Green, Yellow, and Red, but this line was black if that tells you how bad it got. Speaker “Dinner” Fast forward a few hours and it was time for the speaker “dinner.” I put “dinner” in quotes because with this night alone SPSMI set a new bar for nicest and most extravagant speaker appreciation events for SharePoint Saturday. By tapping into some very influential contacts, the conference organizers were able to provide a truck limo (yep you heard right) with refreshments, access to an underground suite at the Palace of Auburn Hills, and courtside tickets to see the Detroit Pistons play that night. Being a Michigan native I have to say that I was absolutely floored by this experience and very thankful to our conference organizers Peter, Sebastian, and Jesse along with Trillium Teamologies. Sessions The actual conference started Saturday morning at 9am with the keynote by Rob Collie who is the Microsoft program manager for PowerPivot. The day continued and I attended the following sessions: Mike Watson (@mikewat) – “SharePoint 2010 Fight Night: Devs vs. Admins” Karl Swedeberg (@kswedberg) – “A Walk on the Client Side with jQuery“ [my session] Brian Jackett (@briantjackett) - “Real World Deployment of SharePoint 2007 Solutions” Jeff Willinger (@jwillie) - “Social Computing and Collaboration Inside and Outside the 4 Walls” Paul Schaeflein (@paulschaeflein) – “PowerShell for the SharePoint Developer” My Presentation I had a great time presenting my session on Deploying SharePoint 2007 Solutions, but it wasn’t without its fair share of technical issues. As my session was right after lunch I came in to my room 10 mins early to set up my laptop, slides, and demos. As a quick background note, a few months ago I got an upgraded laptop from my company Sogeti and have been dual booting it between XP (factory installed) and Windows Server 2008 R2 w/ Hyper-V. As such I had prepared all of my demo virtual machines to run under Hyper-V. About 3 minutes before my session was scheduled to start though it became apparent that I did not have the correct display drivers to connect Windows Server 2008 R2 to the projector… As you can imagine this was a slight cause for concern as I was potentially going to be unable to give my presentation. Luckily for me I usually prepare for such unforeseen issues and had my presentation and some spare VMs that would run on XP on my external hard drive. Knowing this I rebooted my machine into XP and began my presentation without slides until about 5 mins into the session when everything was up and running on XP. Despite this being the first time I gave this presentation I have to say it was one of my favorites I’ve given so far. The audience was very engaged in the session and I received some great, positive feedback afterwards. Thanks to all who attended my session, I appreciate it very much. Link to Presentation Files For those of you who attended my session and would like my slides or demo PowerShell scripts they can be found on my SkyDrive at the link below. Also, if you have a few minutes and wouldn’t mind rating my session I have this session posted on SpeakerRate. As speakers we always appreciate any and all feedback attendees offer, so thank you if you are able to provide any. SkyDrive folder with session files Rate my SharePoint 2007 Solutions session Picture Albums For everyone else, here are my pictures from the weekend. The first link is to my FaceBook album which will have tagging (recommend this one.) The second is to my Live album if you care for higher resolution images. http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2154482&id=21905041&l=a3fb72ee8c View Full Album Conclusion A big thank you goes out to all of the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and attendees of SPSMI. As I’ve said so many times, without each and every one of you these events wouldn’t be possible. I thoroughly enjoyed this trip back to my home state and presenting a new session. For those interested in my upcoming schedule I will be giving two sessions on PowerShell at SharePoint Saturday Charlotte in April, helping plan Stir Trek: Iron Man Edition in May, and I’m submitting sessions to Day of .Net Ann Arbor in May as well. Beyond that I haven’t planned out any travels. Thanks for reading my recap. Look forward to more technical posts now that I have a short break in conferences. -Frog Out links: Michigan image

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Book Review: Oracle ADF Real World Developer’s Guide

- by Frank Nimphius

Recently PACKT Publishing published "Oracle ADF Real World Developer’s Guide" by Jobinesh Purushothaman, a product manager in our team. Though already the sixth book dedicated to Oracle ADF, it has a lot of great information in it that none of the previous books covered, making it a safe buy even for those who own the other books published by Oracle Press (McGrwHill) and PACKT Publishing. More than the half of the "Oracle ADF Real World Developer’s Guide" book is dedicated to Oracle ADF Business Components in a depth and clarity that allows you to feel the expertise that Jobinesh gained in this area. If you enjoy Jobinesh blog (http://jobinesh.blogspot.co.uk/) about Oracle ADF, then, no matter what expert you are in Oracle ADF, this book makes you happy as it provides you with detail information you always wished to have. If you are new to Oracle ADF, then this book alone doesn't get you flying, but, if you have some Java background, accelerates your learning big, big, big times. Chapter 1 is an introduction to Oracle ADF and not only explains the layers but also how it compares to plain Java EE solutions (page 13). If you are new to Oracle JDeveloper and ADF, then at the end of this chapter you know how to start JDeveloper and begin your ADF development Chapter 2 starts with what Jobinesh really is good at: ADF Business Components. In this chapter you learn about the architecture ingredients of ADF Business Components: View Objects, View Links, Associations, Entities, Row Sets, Query Collections and Application Modules. This chapter also provides a introduction to ADFBC SDO services, as well as sequence diagrams for what happens when you execute queries or commit updates. Chapter 3 is dedicated to entity objects and is one of many chapters in this book you will enjoy and never want to miss. Jobinesh explains the artifacts that make up an entity object, how to work with entities and resource bundles, and many advanced topics, including inheritance, change history tracking, custom properties, validation and cursor handling. Chapter 4 - you guessed it - is all about View objects. Comparable to entities, you learn about the XM files and classes that make a view object, as well as how to define and work with queries. List-of-values, inheritance, polymorphism, bind variables and data filtering are interesting - and important topics that follow. Again the chapter provides helpful sequence diagrams for you to understand what happens internally within a view object. Chapter 5 focuses on advanced view object and entity object topics, like lifecycle callback methods and when you want to override them. This chapter is a good digest of Jobinesh's blog entries (which most ADF developers have in their bookmark list). Really worth reading ! Chapter 6 then is bout Application Modules. Beside of what application modules are, this chapter covers important topics like properties, passivation, activation, application module pooling, how and where to write custom logic. In addition you learn about the AM lifecycle and request sequence. Chapter 7 is about the ADF binding layer. If you are new to Oracle ADF and got lost in the more advanced ADF Business Components chapters, then this chapter is where you get back into the game. In very easy terms, Jobinesh explains what the ADF binding is, how it fits into the JSF request lifecycle and what are the metadata file involved. Chapter 8 then goes into building data bound web user interfaces. In this chapter you get the basics of JavaServer Faces (e.g. managed beans) and learn about the interaction between the JSF UI and the ADF binding layer. Later this chapter provides advanced solutions for working with tree components and list of values. Chapter 9 introduces bounded task flows and ADF controller. This is a chapter you want to read if you are new to ADF of have started. Experts don't find anything new here, which doesn't mean that it is not worth reading it (I for example, enjoyed the controller talk very much) Chapter 10 is an advanced coverage of bounded task flow and talks about contextual events Chapter 11 is another highlight and explains error handling, trains, transactions and more. I can only recommend you read this chapter. I am aware of many documents that cover exception handling in Oracle ADF (and my Oracle Magazine article for January/February 2013 does the same), but none that covers it in such a great depth. Chapter 12 covers ADF best practices, which is a great round-up of all the tips provided in this book (without Jobinesh to repeat himself). Its all cool stuff that helps you with your ADF projects. In summary, "Oracle ADF Real World Developer’s Guide" by Jobinesh Purushothaman is a great book and addition for all Oracle ADF developers and those who want to become one. Frank

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Using the “Settings.settings” functionalities in VB.NET can be tricky…

- by Vincent Grondin

Sometime you’re searching for something forever and when you find it, you realize it was right under your nose. Maybe you were distracted by other things around… or maybe that thing right under your nose was so well hidden that it deserves a blog post… That happened to me a few days ago while using the “Settings.settings” functionalities in my VB.NET application… I thought it was a cool feature and I decided to use it… So there I am adding new settings with “USER” scope and StringCollection as the data type, testing my application and everything works perfectly fine... That was before I decided to modify the “Value” of one of my settings… After changing the value of one of my settings, I start my application again and, to my surprise, my new values aren’t showing! Hmmm… That’s odd… My setting was a pretty long list of strings so I was rather angry at myself for not saving my work after I was done… So I open up the Settings.setting in the designer and click the ellipsis symbol to enter my string collection again, but to my great pleasure (and disbelief) my strings are there!!! Alright, you rock VB.NET! You’ve just save me a bunch of typing time and I’m thinking it’s just a simple Visual Studio glitch… I hit “Save” then “Save All” (just in case) and finally I rebuild everything and fire up my app once again. Huh? Where are my darn strings???????? Ok there’s a bug there… I open up the app.config and my new strings are there!!! Alright, let’s recap… My new strings are in the app.config, they show correctly in the Settings.settings designer UI but they aren’t showing at runtime… Hmmmm? Let’s try something else… Let’s start the application but outside Visual Studio this time… I fire up the exe and BAM! My strings where there! I “alt-tab” and hit “F5” and BOOM, no strings! So it’s a bug in the Visual Studio environment… or could it be a FEATURE? I must admit that I’m a little confused over what’s a bug and what’s a feature in Visual Studio… lol! Finally I found out there’s a “cache” for your Visual Studio located here: C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\<your app name and a very weird temp ID>\<your app version>\user.config When using the “Settings.settings” with a setting of scope “user”, this file is out of sync with your app.config until you manually decide to update it… The button is right there… under your nose… at the top left corner of your screen in the settings designer… See the big “Synchronize” button there? Yep… Now that’s user friendly isn’t it? Oh, and wait until you see what it does when you click it… It prompts you and basically says: “Would you like your settings to start working inside Visual Studio now that you found out that I exist?” and of course the right answer is yes… or rather “OK”… Unfortunately, you have to do this every time you edit a value… On the other hand, adding and removing settings seem to work flawlessly without having to click this magical button… go figure! Oh and I almost forgot… this great “feature” is only available for VB.NET… A project in C# using Settings.settings will work perfectly EVEN when editing values… Here’s a screenshot that shows this important button: Button Using other data types appears to work perfectly well… Maybe it’s simply related to the StringCollection data type? If you are a VB.NET programmer, you should pay attention to this when you plan on using the settings functionalities and your scope is “user” and your data type is StringCollection… Happy coding all!

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Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It – book review

- by DigiMortal

How do our users see the products we are writing for them and how happy they are with our work? Are they able to get their work done without fighting with cool features and crashes or are they just switching off resistance part of their brain to survive our software? Yeah, the overall picture of software usability landscape is not very nice. Okay, it is not even nice. But, fortunately, Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It by David S. Platt explains everything. Why Software Sucks… is book for software users but I consider it as a-must reading also for developers and specially for their managers whose politics often kills all usability topics as soon as they may appear. For managers usability is soft topic that can be manipulated the way it is best in current state of project. Although developers are not UI designers and usability experts they are still very often forced to deal with these topics and this is how usability problems start (of course, also designers are able to produce designs that are stupid and too hard to use for users, but this blog here is about development). I found this book to be very interesting and funny reading. It is not humor book but it explains you all so you remember later very well what you just read. It took me about three evenings to go through this book and I am still enjoying what I found and how author explains our weird young working field to end users. I suggest this book to all developers – while you are demanding your management to hire or outsource usability expert you are at least causing less pain to end users. So, go and buy this book, just like I did. And… they thanks to mr. Platt :) There is one book more I suggest you to read if you are interested in usability - Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug. Editorial review from Amazon Today’s software sucks. There’s no other good way to say it. It’s unsafe, allowing criminal programs to creep through the Internet wires into our very bedrooms. It’s unreliable, crashing when we need it most, wiping out hours or days of work with no way to get it back. And it’s hard to use, requiring large amounts of head-banging to figure out the simplest operations. It’s no secret that software sucks. You know that from personal experience, whether you use computers for work or personal tasks. In this book, programming insider David Platt explains why that’s the case and, more importantly, why it doesn’t have to be that way. And he explains it in plain, jargon-free English that’s a joy to read, using real-world examples with which you’re already familiar. In the end, he suggests what you, as a typical user, without a technical background, can do about this sad state of our software—how you, as an informed consumer, don’t have to take the abuse that bad software dishes out. As you might expect from the book’s title, Dave’s expose is laced with humor—sometimes outrageous, but always dead on. You’ll laugh out loud as you recall incidents with your own software that made you cry. You’ll slap your thigh with the same hand that so often pounded your computer desk and wished it was a bad programmer’s face. But Dave hasn’t written this book just for laughs. He’s written it to give long-overdue voice to your own discovery—that software does, indeed, suck, but it shouldn’t. Table of contents Acknowledgments xiii Introduction Chapter 1: Who’re You Calling a Dummy? Where We Came From Why It Still Sucks Today Control versus Ease of Use I Don’t Care How Your Program Works A Bad Feature and a Good One Stopping the Proceedings with Idiocy Testing on Live Animals Where We Are and What You Can Do Chapter 2: Tangled in the Web Where We Came From How It Works Why It Still Sucks Today Client-Centered Design versus Server-Centered Design Where’s My Eye Opener? It’s Obvious—Not! Splash, Flash, and Animation Testing on Live Animals What You Can Do about It Chapter 3: Keep Me Safe The Way It Was Why It Sucks Today What Programmers Need to Know, but Don’t A Human Operation Budgeting for Hassles Users Are Lazy Social Engineering Last Word on Security What You Can Do Chapter 4: Who the Heck Are You? Where We Came From Why It Still Sucks Today Incompatible Requirements OK, So Now What? Chapter 5: Who’re You Looking At? Yes, They Know You Why It Sucks More Than Ever Today Users Don’t Know Where the Risks Are What They Know First Milk You with Cookies? Privacy Policy Nonsense Covering Your Tracks The Google Conundrum Solution Chapter 6: Ten Thousand Geeks, Crazed on Jolt Cola See Them in Their Native Habitat All These Geeks Who Speaks, and When, and about What Selling It The Next Generation of Geeks—Passing It On Chapter 7: Who Are These Crazy Bastards Anyway? Homo Logicus Testosterone Poisoning Control and Contentment Making Models Geeks and Jocks Jargon Brains and Constraints Seven Habits of Geeks Chapter 8: Microsoft: Can’t Live With ’Em and Can’t Live Without ’Em They Run the World Me and Them Where We Came From Why It Sucks Today Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t We Love to Hate Them Plus ça Change Growing-Up Pains What You Can Do about It The Last Word Chapter 9: Doing Something About It 1. Buy 2. Tell 3. Ridicule 4. Trust 5. Organize Epilogue About the Author

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On Life and TechEd…

- by MOSSLover

I haven’t been writing here I know. I am very sorry, but I am just too busy trying to make my personal life just as good as my SharePoint life. So I was at TechEd again helping with the hands on labs, but I had a very long couple of weeks. I will have a long week again. I started out going to my friend, Randy Walker’s, wedding and I ended up at my grandmother’s condo in Fort Lauderdale. It was a very trying week. I had to drive 5 1/2 hours to the wedding from St. Louis and back. So Randy is an awesome person. He is a great guy and he was the first person ever to nominate me for MVP. I knew it probably wasn’t going anywhere, but it was the thought that count. I met Randy in 2008 at Tulsa Techfest. We had fun jamming out to Rockband. I knew he was good people back then. He has let me vent and I have let him vent over countless personal problems. He has always been a great friend. So it was a no brainer when I decided to go to his wedding no matter how much driving or stress or lack of sleep it was worth it. I am incredibly happy for him to finally find a diamond amongst a lot of coal. To take part in his celebration was so awesome. I thank him again for letting me participate in this ceremony. Now after Randy’s wedding I drove 5 1/2 hours landed in St. Louis, fed a cat an asthma pill hidden in wet cat food, and slept for 4 hours. I immediately saw my best friend who dropped me off at the airport and proceeded to TechEd. I slept 1 hour on each flight, then ended up working a 3 hour shift at TechEd. The rest of the week was a haze of connecting with people and sleeping very little. I got to see my friend Tasha and her husband Casey plus a billion other people. It was a great week and then I got a call from my grandmother. It turns out her husband was admitted to the hospital. My grandparents on my dad's side have been divorced since the 60s, which means I never got to see them together. I always felt like they never cliqued. When I was a kid we would always spend half our time in Chicago at grandma’s and half our time at grandpa’s houses. We would hang out with my grandpa’s wife Bobbi and my grandma’s husband Leo. My cousin’s always called Leo by Pappa and my brother and I would use Leo. My cousins lived in Chicago up until my cousin Gavi was born then they moved to Philadelphia. I remember complaining to my dad that we never visited anywhere cool just Chicago and Kansas City. I also remember Leo teaching me and my brother, Sam, how to climb a tree and play tennis on the back of the apartment wall. My grandfather’s was kind of stuffy and boring, but we always enjoyed my grandmother’s. She had games and Disney Movies and toys. Leo always made it a ton of fun to visit. I’m not sure a lot of people knew this fact, but when I was 16 years old I saw my grandfather on my mother’s side slowly die of congestive heart failure in a nursing home. When I was 18 I saw my grandmother on my mother’s side slowly die of an infection over a 30 day period. I hate hospitals and I hate nursing homes, but sometimes you have to suck in your gut and be strong. I tried to do that this weekend and I hope I did an ok job. I really hope things get better, but if they don’t I really appreciate everything he has given me in life. I am a terrible tennis player and I haven’t climbed a tree in ages, but they both encouraged me when encouragement from my parents was lacking. It was Father’s Day today and I have to at least pay tribute to Leo Morris, because he has been a good person to me all my life. Technorati Tags: TechEd,Grandparents,Father's Day

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.NET 3.5 Installation Problems in Windows 8

- by Rick Strahl

Windows 8 installs with .NET 4.5. A default installation of Windows 8 doesn't seem to include .NET 3.0 or 3.5, although .NET 2.0 does seem to be available by default (presumably because Windows has app dependencies on that). I ran into some pretty nasty compatibility issues regarding .NET 3.5 which I'll describe in this post. I'll preface this by saying that depending on how you install Windows 8 you may not run into these issues. In fact, it's probably a special case, but one that might be common with developer folks reading my blog. Specifically it's the install order that screwed things up for me - installing Visual Studio before explicitly installing .NET 3.5 from Windows Features - in particular. If you install Visual Studio 2010 I highly recommend you install .NET 3.5 from Windows features BEFORE you install Visual Studio 2010 and save yourself the trouble I went through. So when I installed Windows 8, and then looked at the Windows Features to install after the fact in the Windows Feature dialog, I thought - .NET 3.5 - who needs it. I'd be happy to not have to install .NET 3.5, but unfortunately I found out quite a while after initial installation that one of my applications/tools (DevExpress's awesome CodeRush) depends on it and won't install without it. Enabling .NET 3.5 in Windows 8 If you want to run .NET 3.5 on Windows 8, don't download an installer - those installers don't work on Windows 8, and you don't need to do this because you can use the Windows Features dialog to enable .NET 3.5: And that *should* do the trick. If you do this before you install other apps that require .NET 3.5 and install a non-SP1 one version of it, you are going to have no problems. Unfortunately for me, even after I've installed the above, when I run the CodeRush installer I still get this lovely dialog: Now I double checked to see if .NET 3.5 is installed - it is, both for 32 bit and 64 bit. I went as far as creating a small .NET Console app and running it to verify that it actually runs. And it does… So naturally I thought the CodeRush installer is a little whacky. After some back and forth Alex Skorkin on Twitter pointed me in the right direction: He asked me to look in the registry for exact info on which version of .NET 3.5 is installed here: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP where I found that .NET 3.5 SP1 was installed. This is the 64 bit key which looks all correct. However, when I looked under the 32 bit node I found: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\NET Framework Setup\NDP\v3.5 Notice that the service pack number is set to 0, rather than 1 (which it was for the 64 bit install), which is what the installer requires. So to summarize: the 64 bit version is installed with SP1, the 32 bit version is not. Uhm, Ok… thanks for that! Easy to fix, you say - just install SP1. Nope, not so easy because the standalone installer doesn't work on Windows 8. I can't get either .NET 3.5 installer or the SP 1 installer to even launch. They simply start and hang (or exit immediately) without messages. I also tried to get Windows to update .NET 3.5 by checking for Windows Updates, which should pick up on the dated version of .NET 3.5 and pull down SP1, but that's also no go. Check for Updates doesn't bring down any updates for me yet. I'm sure at some random point in the future Windows will deem it necessary to update .NET 3.5 to SP1, but at this point it's not letting me coerce it to do it explicitly. How did this happen I'm not sure exactly whether this is the cause and effect, but I suspect the story goes like this: Installed Windows 8 without support for .NET 3.5 Installed Visual Studio 2010 which installs .NET 3.5 (no SP) I now had .NET 3.5 installed but without SP1. I then: Tried to install CodeRush - Error: .NET 3.5 SP1 required Enabled .NET 3.5 in Windows Features I figured enabling the .NET 3.5 Windows Features would do the trick. But still no go. Now I suspect Visual Studio installed the 32 bit version of .NET 3.5 on my machine and Windows Features detected the previous install and didn't reinstall it. This left the 32 bit install at least with no SP1 installed. How to Fix it My final solution was to completely uninstall .NET 3.5 *and* to reboot: Go to Windows Features Uncheck the .NET Framework 3.5 Restart Windows Go to Windows Features Check .NET Framework 3.5 and voila, I now have a proper installation of .NET 3.5. I tried this before but without the reboot step in between which did not work. Make sure you reboot between uninstalling and reinstalling .NET 3.5! More Problems The above fixed me right up, but in looking for a solution it seems that a lot of people are also having problems with .NET 3.5 installing properly from the Windows Features dialog. The problem there is that the feature wasn't properly loading from the installer disks or not downloading the proper components for updates. It turns out you can explicitly install Windows features using the DISM tool in Windows.dism.exe /online /enable-feature /featurename:NetFX3 /Source:f:\sources\sxs You can try this without the /Source flag first - which uses the hidden Windows installer files if you kept those. Otherwise insert the DVD or ISO and point at the path \sources\sxs path where the installer lives. This also gives you a little more information if something does go wrong.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Windows .NET Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Off The Beaten Path—Three Things Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful For

- by Christine Randle

By: Jim Lein, Senior Director, Oracle Accelerate Last Sunday I went on a walkabout. That’s when I just step out the door of my Colorado home and hike through the mountains for hours with no predetermined destination. I favor “social trails”, the unmapped routes pioneered by both animal and human explorers. These tracks are usually more challenging than established, marked routes and you can’t be 100% sure of where you’re going to end up. But I’ve found the rewards to be much greater. For awhile, I pondered on how—depending upon your perspective—the current economic situation worldwide could be viewed as either a classic “the glass is half empty” or a “the glass is half full” scenario. Midsize companies buy Oracle to grow and so I’m continually amazed and fascinated by the success stories our customers relate to me. Oracle’s successful midsize companies are growing via innovation, agility, and opportunity. For them, the glass isn’t half full—it’s overflowing. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Innovation The sun angling through the pine trees reminded me of a conversation with a European customer a year ago May. You might not recognize the name but, chances are, your local evening weather report relies on this company’s weather observation, monitoring and measurement products. For decades, the company was recognized in its industry for product innovation, but its recent rapid growth comes from tailoring end to end product and service solutions based on the needs of distinctly different customer groups across industrial, public sector, and defense sectors. Hours after that phone call I was walking my dog in a local park and came upon a small white plastic box sprouting short antennas and dangling by a nylon cord from a tree branch. I cut it down. The name of that customer’s company was stamped on the housing. “It’s a radiosonde from a high altitude weather balloon,” he told me the next day. “Keep it as a souvenir.” It sits on my fireplace mantle and elicits many questions from guests. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Agility In July, I had another interesting discussion with the CFO of an Asia-Pacific company which owns and operates a large portfolio of leisure assets. They are best known for their epic outdoor theme parks. However, their primary growth today is coming from a chain of indoor amusement centers in the USA where billiards, bowling, and laser tag take the place of roller coasters, kiddy rides, and wave pools. With mountains and rivers right out my front door, I’m not much for theme parks, but I’ll take a spirited game of laser tag any day. This company has grown dramatically since first implementing Oracle ERP more than a decade ago. Their profitable expansion into a completely foreign market is derived from the ability to replicate proven and efficient best business practices across diverse operating environments. They recently went live on Oracle’s Fusion HCM and Taleo. Their CFO explained to me how, with thousands of employees in three countries, Fusion HCM and Taleo would enable them to remain incredibly agile by acting on trends linking individual employee performance to their management, establishing and maintaining those best practices. Growing Midsize Companies are Thankful for: Opportunity I have three GPS apps on my iPhone. I use them mainly to keep track of my stats—distance, time, and vertical gain. However, every once in awhile I need to find the most efficient route back home before dark from my current location (notice I didn’t use the word “lost”). In August I listened in on an interview with the CFO of another European company that designs and delivers telematics solutions—the integrated use of telecommunications and informatics—for managing the mobile workforce. These solutions enable customers to achieve evolutionary step-changes in their performance and service delivery. Forgive the overused metaphor, but this is route optimization on steroids. The company’s executive team saw an opportunity in this emerging market and went “all in”. Consequently, they are being rewarded with tremendous growth results and market domination by providing the ability for their clients to collect and analyze performance information related to fuel consumption, service workforce safety, and asset productivity. This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for health, family, friends, and a career with an innovative company that helps companies leverage top tier software to drive and manage growth. And I’m thankful to have learned the lesson that good things happen when you get off the beaten path—both when hiking and when forging new routes through a complex world economy. Halfway through my walkabout on Sunday, after scrambling up a long stretch of scree-covered hill, I crested a ridge with an obstructed view of 14,265 ft Mt Evans just a few miles to the west. There, nowhere near a house or a trail, someone had placed a wooden lounge chair. Its wood was worn and faded but it was sturdy. I had lunch and a cold drink in my pack. Opportunity knocked and I seized it. Happy Thanksgiving.

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Record and Play your WebLogic Console Tasks Like a DVR

- by james.bayer

Automation using WebLogic Scripting Tool Today on the Oracle internal mailing list for WebLogic Server questions someone asked how to automate the configuration of the thread model for WebLogic Server and they were having trouble with the jython scripting syntax. I’ve previously written about this feature called Work Managers and the associated constraints. However, I did not show how to automate the process of configuring this without the console using WebLogic Scripting Tool – the jython scripting automation environment abbreviated as WLST. I’ve written some very basic introductions to WLST before and there is also an Oracle By Example on the subject, but this is a bit more advanced. Fear not because there is a really easy-to-use feature of the WLS console that lets you “Record” user actions just like a DVR. Using these recordings of the web-based console, you can easily create a script even if you are unfamiliar with the WLST syntax and API. I’m a big fan of both DVR’s and automation as can be evidenced with this old Halloween picture taken during simpler times. Obviously the Cast Away and The Big Labowski references show some age. I was a big Tivo fan-boy back in the day and I still think it’s the best DVR. I strongly believe that WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) is an absolutely essential tool for automating administration tasks in anything beyond a development environment. Even in development environments you can make a case that it makes sense to start the automation for environments downstream. I promise you that once you start using it for any tasks that you do even semi-regularly, you won’t go back to clicking through the console. It’s simply so much more efficient and less error-prone to run a script. Let’s say you need to create a Work Manager and MaxThreadsConstraint – the easy way to do it is configure it in the WLS console first while capturing the commands with a recording. See the images for the simple steps – click to enlarge. Record Console Configurations to a File Review the Recordings and Make Slight Modifications In order to make the recorded .py file directly callable as a stand-alone script I added calls to the connect() and edit() functions at the beginning and calls to disconnect() and exit() at the end – otherwise the main section of the script was provided by the console recording. Below is the resulting file I saved as d:/temp/wm.py connect('weblogic','welcome1', 't3://localhost:7001') edit() startEdit() cd('/SelfTuning/wl_server') cmo.createMaxThreadsConstraint('MaxThreadsConstraint-0') cd('/SelfTuning/wl_server/MaxThreadsConstraints/MaxThreadsConstraint-0') set('Targets',jarray.array([ObjectName('com.bea:Name=examplesServer,Type=Server')], ObjectName)) cmo.setCount(5) cmo.unSet('ConnectionPoolName') cd('/SelfTuning/wl_server') cmo.createWorkManager('WorkManager-0') cd('/SelfTuning/wl_server/WorkManagers/WorkManager-0') set('Targets',jarray.array([ObjectName('com.bea:Name=examplesServer,Type=Server')], ObjectName)) cmo.setMaxThreadsConstraint(getMBean('/SelfTuning/wl_server/MaxThreadsConstraints/MaxThreadsConstraint-0')) cmo.setIgnoreStuckThreads(false) activate() disconnect() exit() Run the Script If you want to test it be sure to delete the Work Manager and MaxThreadConstraint that you had previously created in the console. Do something like the following - set up the environment and tell WLST to execute the script which happens in the first 2 lines, the rest doesn’t require any user input: D:\Oracle\wls11g\wlserver_10.3\samples\domains\wl_server\bin>setDomainEnv.cmd D:\Oracle\wls11g\wlserver_10.3\samples\domains\wl_server>java weblogic.WLST d:\temp\wm.py Initializing WebLogic Scripting Tool (WLST) ... Welcome to WebLogic Server Administration Scripting Shell Type help() for help on available commands Connecting to t3://localhost:7001 with userid weblogic ... Successfully connected to Admin Server 'examplesServer' that belongs to domain 'wl_server'. Warning: An insecure protocol was used to connect to the server. To ensure on-the-wire security, the SSL port or Admin port should be used instead. Location changed to edit tree. This is a writable tree with DomainMBean as the root. To make changes you will need to start an edit session via startEdit(). For more help, use help(edit) Starting an edit session ... Started edit session, please be sure to save and activate your changes once you are done. Activating all your changes, this may take a while ... The edit lock associated with this edit session is released once the activation is completed. Activation completed Disconnected from weblogic server: examplesServer Exiting WebLogic Scripting Tool. Now if you go back and look in the console the changes have been made and we now have a compete script. Of course there is a full MBean reference and you can learn the nuances of jython and WLST, but why not the WLS console do most of the work for you! Happy scripting.

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